As the Netherlands heads for a general election, barely a day passes
without a mention of "Henk and Ingrid", or Mr and Mrs Average, in a
political debate that has revolved around the economy and the euro zone
debt crisis.

The invention of populist politician Geert Wilders - who heads
the anti-immigration, anti-euro Freedom Party - this mythical couple
attracted a different kind of notoriety after a real Dutch Henk, with a
wife called Ingrid, killed a Turkish immigrant, prompting commentators
to warn that populism can backfire.

Until now, voters have been receptive to homespun stories about
the imaginary hardworking couple who, Wilders says, are fed up with
Muslim immigration, and lately with the cost to Dutch taxpayers of
bailouts resulting from the euro zone debt crisis.

Wilders' anti-immigration, anti-Muslim rhetoric propelled his
party into third place in the 2010 election and gave him real power and
influence as the minority government's ally in parliament. It was
Wilders who brought that government down in April when he refused to
support budget cuts to reduce the deficit to meet EU targets.

"The cultural issues that dominated from 2006 are off the agenda
since the economic crisis really hit us hard in Europe," said Andre
Krouwel, a political scientist at VU University Amsterdam.

Krouwel says the tragic story of Henk and Ingrid highlights the
limits to the kind of opportunistic populism that he said had passed its
high tide in the country.

Henk was implicated in the apparent racist killing of a Turkish immigrant in the poor, post-industrial town of Almelo.

According to the newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, a long-running
conflict between Henk, 61, his wife Ingrid, 59, and the family of a
Turkish immigrant named Aziz Kara, 64, came to a head last Saturday. During an argument, Henk threw Kara to the ground. Kara went into a coma
and later died.

The sad irony of an apparent racist killing being committed by
two people sharing the names of Wilders' mythical populist couple has
been widely noted, furnishing material for comedians in an Amsterdam
club on Friday night.

Popular Turkish family

Henk and Ingrid used to refer to Kara's family as "the mafia,"
putting on Dutch music to drown out their Turkish music, and complaining
that the Turkish family, popular in the neighbourhood, was "spying on"
them, the newspaper reported.

"This is the risk of a strategy that's based on imagery and
issue-ownership. They connect with the personal lives of people, but you
run the great risk of someone turning up with exactly the name and the
position," said Krouwel, who compared Wilders' misfortune to that which
befell John McCain when he took up the cause of "Joe the Plumber" in the
2008 U.S. presidential elections.

"It's a cynical thing when you take up someone like Joe the Plumber, and then he turns out to be a racist idiot."

The latest opinion polls show the Freedom Party would win only 20
seats in the 150-seat parliament, down from 24 in the 2010 election.
This week in a new round of defections, two more lawmakers resigned from
Wilders' party, accusing him of running it like a North Korean-style
"politburo", and leaving it with just 21 members of parliament.

A survey published on Sunday by the pollster Maurice de Hond also
suggests cultural populism may have had its day. Only a fifth of
respondents supported Wilders' call to exclude Turkey from NATO, but
more than half supported his proposals for cutting value-added tax and
fuel duty.

However, Wilders' Freedom Party still lags the other Dutch
populist party - the far-left Socialist Party, which also has an
anti-austerity, pro-growth agenda.

The Socialist Party, which in the 1970s was still an
unreconstructed Maoist-Marxist party, has "social-democratised" itself,
according to Krouwel, and is now on course to become the largest party,
with as many as 31 seats.

That could be bad news for Germany after the Dutch election on
September 12. Under Liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Christian
Democrat Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager, the Netherlands has been
Germany's closest ally in pushing for fiscal rigour and painful
austerity in Europe's indebted south.

The Socialist Party, with its focus on jobs and economic growth,
could be a much more difficult partner. Although the Netherlands has a
consensual political culture and a tradition of big, unwieldy
coalitions, Socialist Party leader Emile Roemer would have trouble
finding coalition partners to support his economic agenda, Krouwel said.